This Sunday is Mother’s Day or, as it was when I was a lad, Mothering Sunday.

This has its origins in the olden days when people were expected to visit their Mother Church on the fourth Sunday of Lent.

Later on in the days of service the custom evolved so that chamber maids and apprentices were given the weekend off to go and visit their families.

The Lentern vows were lifted a little for the duration and girls traditionally took a simnel cake home as a gift. Now we send our mums flowers which have been ordered online and grown in Kenya then flown thousands of miles, producing goodness knows how much carbon dioxide.

Like so many of the old feasts and celebrations, Mother’s Day has been hijacked by the card and flower industries so that this charming custom has become yet another day when we feel obliged by guilt to buy each other yet more gifts.

We spend around £2.2 billion (yes billion) on cut flowers and indoor plants each year and about 70 per cent of those are imported.

My favourite TV gardener Sarah Raven has been campaigning to get people to buy British grown cut flowers in season rather than hot-house imports.

If we all bought British, it would help our own commercial growers and would save a huge amount of fuel that is used transporting flowers around the world. It would also help to keep us connected to the changing seasons rather than expecting roses in February and sunflowers in March.

Better still we can all grow some of our own.

Attentive readers might have noticed that here on the Go Organic column we have tended to steer clear of flowers in favour of the edible crops but even I am going to try and grow a few more blooms this year.

With just the tiniest bit of forward planning in November it is possible to have a bunch of daffodils ready for the special Sunday.

I suspect most mums would far prefer a home-grown bunch of daffs proffered from a grubby hand to the swankiest bunch of hot-house orchids.